The term Monomyth, which Campbell found in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and adopted, denotes “an archetypal story that springs from the collective unconscious (Joseph Campbell: Pathways to Bliss).” This definition is uncharacteristically loose for Campbell and it is not clear whether it applies to any archetypal story, as the quote would appear to indicate, or is meant to apply specifically to the myth of the hero, the most widespread mythological structure on earth, as Campbell’s best known and most widely read book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces proposes. For the purpose of our discourse, we shall opt for the second proposal, because Campbell uses the myth of the hero as the basis for his treatment of artist as mythmaker.

The hero myth, as Campbell postulates and proves in his seminal book, corresponds in its stages to the sequence of upadhi unfolding along an individual’s journey of self-realisation. Each individual is, in that respect, representative not only of the entire human race but also of the universe as a whole. “The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world. (The Hero with a Thousand Faces)”.

Why would the flow of life need to be released again? It must have been, somewhere along the way, stopped. Why, and what had stopped it? We have shown that human beings require an interface crucified on the axes of space and time in order to be able to access the generative abstract transcendent. In other words, they need meaningfully organised mythologems. As long as people remain aware that they merely point to the mystery beyond, the mythologems will remain functional and pour out the flow of life like so many fountains. The moment people forget that fact, however, and claim absolute historic reality for their mythologems, they will become opaque and block the flow. When this happens, and it always does at some stage or other, the life of the social group (or even of mankind) turns to ashes. Our fellow man desperately needs a boon at such a time, and a hero to provide it.

The stages of the Monomyth, thanks to the concept’s Star Wars fame, are by now extremely well known and are to be found on a huge number of websites. We shall list them here anyway, taken from Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and slightly modified the better to fit our purpose. They are as follows:




The returned, life-affirming hero, Campbell believes, is not going to be king, butcher, baker or candlestick-maker: that is how it used to be in days gone by. In our day and age, he will be an artist.